


Delivered From The Blast

by CantStopImagining



Category: Jessica Jones (TV)
Genre: F/F, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-15
Updated: 2015-12-15
Packaged: 2018-05-06 21:37:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5431697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CantStopImagining/pseuds/CantStopImagining
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It’s a bit anticlimatic; walking down streets feeling paranoid and then a small voice in the back of her head (or occasionally, a calm voice to the side of her, a blonde head, a touch of hands that’s gone in the blink of an eye) telling her it’s okay now, like it’s that easy, like things can go back to normal just like that." </p><p>Jessica deals with the aftermath of Kilgrave.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Delivered From The Blast

**Author's Note:**

> This is loosely based on a photo set I also made which I posted on tumblr (my username is deliabusbys if you want to check it out), and kind of spiralled out of control (as a lot of my stories seem to do). Title from a Smashing Pumpkins song.

There’s a before Kilgrave, and an after Kilgrave. And then, there’s an… after after Kilgrave?

(Jessica’s aware that it makes him sound like god, or the sun, like the world is revolving around him, and even after he’s gone, dead and buried, it makes her feel sick to think about, but it’s the only way she can compartmentalise).

Once she’s released from custody, once the charges are dropped and she can go back to the land of the living, Jessica doesn’t know where she stands. After Kilgrave was fucked up, and while she ought to feel safer now, she can’t quite fight off that sense of panic. It’s a bit anticlimatic; walking down streets feeling paranoid and then a small voice in the back of her head (or occasionally, a calm voice to the side of her, a blonde head, a touch of hands that’s gone in the blink of an eye) telling her it’s okay now, like it’s that easy, like things can go back to normal just like that. Hell, Jessica doesn’t even know what normal is. Her version of ‘normal’ is letting herself into her apartment and searching every goddamn corner of it before she can collapse on her bed with a bottle of scotch and a throbbing headache. Her version of normal is flinching every time a stranger brushes past her in the grocery store, and almost killing an innocent child who taps her on the shoulder to hand her back change she’s dropped.

There’s a before Kilgrave, but there’s also a before before Kilgrave. Jessica can’t pretend he is the One Bad Thing that happened to her, a foggy patch in an otherwise perfect life, because that would be lying. She can mark out her downward spiral with life events, marked out like tiny flags on a map. Like a detective’s pin-board, with strings between pieces of evidence. Yes, that moment she became a murderer sticks out like a blaring red beacon, but it’s not the first, or the last, and these are the things she sees behind her eyelids when she lies awake at night. A constellation of moments, reasons. Her grip on the whiskey bottle tightens. She has no demon to fight away whilst awake, but in sleep it’s a different story.

Trish wants her to move back in. She seems to think it will be easy to slot back into their old life, the one they had for years Before Kilgrave (capital letters are crucial). Maybe like jigsaw pieces that have been mixed around but finally all fit into place. Only Jessica doesn’t think her piece fits any more, not without some corners being trimmed. Like a child squashing a triangle block into a square hole.

That probably isn’t fair - Trish has been through enough herself. Jessica knows she isn’t the person she was at the start of all of this, either. She knows that her moving back in isn’t supposed to be a quick fix. Trish just wants her close. She longs for it too, to be able to rest her bones beside hers, the only person in the whole world who she fully trusts, to finally allow herself to sleep. But it’s not the answer.

She moves on auto-pilot mostly. She fills glasses with scotch, stays up late mulling over old case details under the light of the moon. She moves like clockwork, unthinking and unchanging, and doing only what’s absolute necessary for survival. It’s like the first time, and she thinks it’s easier like this. It was easier when she was sure it was over. (She’s sure it’s over now, isn’t she? Didn’t she see him die this time? She felt his bones crack under her finger tips. He’s gone.)

(It doesn’t feel like anything is over, like maybe something is just beginning).

Her apartment is pieced back together brick by brick. It doesn’t happen in a day, but in a series of moments, mostly whilst she’s out. She’s ashamed when one day she walks through to her bedroom and only just realises that the gaping hole in her wall - her second window, she’d joked - is filled, repaired, and she’s only just noticed.

She drops Trish a text message. She wants to say ‘I don’t need your help’ but all she can type is ‘thank you’ and she thinks even if she said it a thousand times it wouldn’t be enough.

(Not just for fixing that one hole. For fixing many.)

Malcolm has swept her apartment floor, letting himself in and busying himself with cleaning around her, and it’s not that Jessica doesn’t notice, but more that she doesn’t quite know what to do with him. The guilty feeling hasn’t quite subsided. She’s tried to drown it in alcohol, but it seems to have learnt how to swim. She instead offers him a tight lipped smile over the top of her glass, and doesn’t tell him to leave. She lets him potter around her office - answering calls, scribbling notes, playing secretary - and before she’s realised it, he’s made himself a permanent fixture, and she can’t seem to mind it.

Not that she would ever admit that.

She doesn’t cut Trish off, not like before. She ducks and dives invites to dinners and lunches and even nights curled up on her sofa, but she answers her calls and texts. She appears on her balcony exactly twice, once with take-out, which they eat in awkward silence, and once because she can’t sleep. She can’t cleanse her mind of the image of Trish kissing Kilgrave, and she knows it isn’t Trish’s fault - that if she’s learnt anything from this whole thing, it’s that Trish Walker is the key to everything, the answer to every unasked question; life, the universe, everything - but Jessica can’t deal with it yet. She doesn’t deal with emotions. All she can do is cut them off, shut them away until she’s better equipped.

Trish texts saying “I miss you” and it’s all Jessica can do not to cry as she types back “me too” but stays rooted in her desk chair, fingers tight around an empty bottle.

I love you, she thinks, picking at the edges of the label, her eyes squinty and her head swimming, but then, you know that, don’t you?

*

It takes her six weeks to reassemble something like a life Before Kilgrave (or After The First Time Kilgrave Died, because she doesn’t think she could ever get back to Before). She gets a case. She stops spending night after night out on fire escapes with only her camera for company, no case to be solved, her muscle memory not giving her anything else to do. She sorts herself out.

It’s easier to sever all ties with Kilgrave. Jessica gets Malcolm to delete every voicemail, screen every call if it’s pertaining to him, and she knows there’s many. He looks like he’s going to argue, but he nods, and she watches him as he spends hour after hour after hour sifting through phone messages.

When she breaks her first case, she gives him 55%.

Most importantly, she sees Trish. They go to a bar - somewhere Patricia Walker would never be caught dead - and they talk and drink (whiskey for Jessica, soda for Trish) for hours. She even laughs, the sound rising up out of her throat and sounding like a foreign language. Trish, her eyes glassy, laces their fingers together, mutters “welcome back Jessica Jones”, and for an awful minute, she thinks she might kiss her.

(She doesn’t).

When she collapses on Trish’s couch, just for a moment it feels like home. She wakes up with a blanket dragged over her, and a smile on her face for the first time in months.

She doesn’t see Luke. That’s sort of pivotal, she thinks. She doesn’t lurk around his end of town, or sit herself up on the edge of a building across the street. She doesn’t snap photos of him in the dark, or even let herself lay eyes on him from a distance. After it all came down, she came back to her apartment and he was gone, and she decided to leave him gone. She thinks it’s what he deserves.  
“Are you and Luke—“

“No. I let him go.” 

He doesn’t deserve to have to see the face of the woman who killed his wife for a second longer.

*

One night, she gets into her apartment to find a black cat sitting on the window ledge. It’s a scrawny thing with scruffy fur and large, beady eyes, and it meows at her as she sits at her desk. She’d left her window open a crack. Her papers are all over the floor.

“How the hell’d you get up here?” she mutters, staring down the side of her building. She lives on the fourth floor.

In the morning, the cat’s gone. Jessica sloped off to bed without it, shutting the door tightly behind her, and glad not for the first time that the hole in her wall had been fixed.

Two days later it’s back. And back again the night after that.

“How do I get rid of this thing?” she asks Trish, texting her a picture of the feline intruder.

“CUTE!!” Trish texts back, and then, “you know, ‘Trish’ is a great name for a cat ;-)”

“I’m not keeping it.”

Then, four days later, when it’s still living in her apartment and she’s gone so far as to put a bowl of water down for it, has cut it up a leftover chicken breast (of questionable quality), and is scratching it behind its ears: “I’ve called it Hellcat. Cos it’s fresh out of Hell.”

So, Malcolm and the scruffy stray become permanent, and Jessica pretends to be annoyed about it, but in reality, she’s glad of the company. As much as she gripes about it to begin with, she enjoys cases more now she has Malcolm there for her to bounce ideas off. They become an unlikely duo, and she stops hiding her fondness for him, even if her way of showing it isn’t necessarily the same as most people’s; small smiles and bonuses and sharp quips and silently ordering take out food for him when he’s been in the office for too many hours. Always making sure the kitchen is stocked with crunchy peanut butter. Little things. She doesn’t want anyone to think she’s going soft.

(She occasionally lets Hellcat curl up on her spare pillow in bed, but if you tell anyone, she’ll see you don’t have a jaw to use next time).

 

*

 

She starts to spend more and more time with Trish. It feels comfortable, easy, almost like— No, she won’t say it’s like it was Before because that will jinx it, and besides, this is different. Something between them has meshed together to make things different. The elephant in the room, the unspoken that swallows up their silences and yet doesn’t quite make things uneasy.

“I wish you would just stay here,” Trish whispers, her voice heavy with exhaustion, her eyes hooded. She’s drawn Jessica’s hand into her lap, and she’s absently playing with her fingers. Jessica’s throat feels dry.

“Can’t. How’s Hellcat supposed to live without me?” she says, hoarsely.

Trish laughs, “you love that cat. I knew you would.”

“I love you.”

The words come out with the fluidity that comes with saying them often, though Jessica doesn’t. She’s only uttered them once before. As soon as she’s said it, she knows it was the right thing, because of the sloppy smile that drifts over Trish’s features, the way she squeezes her fingers tight.

“So, stay,” she says, and there’s a darkness in her eyes that Jessica hasn’t seen there before, or if she has it was years ago. When evil step mothers were the only dragons to slay, and Trish was another person. It was a different life.

She thinks about what it would be like to kiss her, absently wonders if this isn’t what their whole lives have been geared towards. Kilgrave had been right; no one else mattered to her like Trish mattered. Hadn’t she spent years wondering what it would feel like to have Trish’s lips soft against hers? Even when they were teenagers, when Jessica with flushed cheeks had slipped her hand into her own pants and lay there thinking of soft blonde hair and bright green eyes, hadn’t she longed for this moment? She’d thought she’d grow out of it. An adolescent phase, a sick fantasy. Trish, the only person who trusted her and who she trusted, and who knew her secret. She thought she had grown out of it.

“Is this because of—“

Trish shakes her head, cutting her off, “it’s because of you. Nothing else. Us.”

Jessica thinks of the last person Trish kissed. She wonders if its on her mind too, can’t help but wonder if this isn’t all down to that, to him, to a need to be back in control. She fucked Simpson too, days after he tried to kill her, to flip things over, to prove to herself that she was in control.

Maybe it’s easier to think that way. Maybe it’s easier to pretend that’s all this is, because if this is something else… once it reaches that stage of being something else, the game changes. A decade of friendship changes.

Relationships have always been hot and heavy for Jessica. They don’t come easily anymore. She thinks of Luke, of being crushed against him, of his bed straining beneath them. I won’t break. She thinks of shattering glass and breaking walls and a need to feel something, anything not to remember the feeling of helplessness, of writhing around because Kilgrave wanted her to, of reciprocating but wanting to scream no, of wanting to push away. She thinks of biting and scratching and trying to leave bruises on Luke’s skin, of wanting some way to claim him as hers, even after she knew what she was doing was twisted and fucked up.

She thinks of how easily Trish bruises.

Jessica isn’t a gentle person. Her grip is like metal on metal, like parts of a gun. Her fingers snap locks from doors as if she’s breaking a chip in half. She used to find it difficult to get control of her strength, but she does better now. Gentleness still doesn’t come naturally. Spreading a blanket over her sleeping housemate or holding back her hair whilst she puked or rubbing calming circles in her back after a nightmare. Everything gentle that she’s ever done, she thinks, is rooted in Trish.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” she says, and it’s a loaded statement. It’s not all about physical strength. She thinks of Kilgrave, of the three separate times this year she’s seen Trish in a hospital bed. She thinks of her crying and sniffling over the phone, begging her to come home, Jessica squeezing her eyes closed, pretending it isn’t hurting her just as much being away from her, cutting her off. Hasn’t she hurt her enough?

“It’s over,” Trish reminds her, her face so close to Jessica’s, “you don’t have to risk me anymore. You saved the day, Jessica Jones. Just like always.”

Jess swallows. She hates that Trish has this complex about her being a hero, that Trish trusts her so completely that, even when she’s been proved wrong time and time again, she still wholeheartedly believes that Jessica would never - could never - hurt her.

“You know,” Trish says, pulling back, the moment supposedly over, her lips twitching into a smile, “I could totally take you in a fight anyway.”

She hopes Trish means it. She’s spent too long watching her beat herself up over the tasing, over Kilgrave getting inside her head. She hopes Trish sees herself as the strong woman Jessica knows she is.

“I don’t doubt that for a second,” Jessica tells her, watching Trish stifle a yawn.

She does stay, but she takes the couch, and not before carrying a passed out Trish to bed.

*

Spring cleaning isn’t exactly a term Jess is familiar with. Cleaning, at all, actually. Unless it’s because she’s run out of clean glasses to drink from (and even then, if she sniffs and all she can smell is alcohol, and it isn’t growing mould… where’s the harm? And anyway, who needs a glass when there’s a bottle?), or the pair of jeans she’s been crawling into for three weeks in a row start feeling like they might walk off without her, cleaning isn’t something she particularly prides herself on doing.  
 (Showering, though… she showers every morning, lets the water run really hot, enjoys the way it burns at her skin…)

So, when Malcolm suggests they do a spring clean of her office space, make it a bit more habitable, she scoffs at him. But, two days later, they’re sitting on her apartment floor, going through papers, drawer by drawer.

“You know you have a receipt in here for a couch you don’t even own anymore,” Malcolm says, flapping paper in front of her face, and then crumpling it up and nimbly shooting it into the bin.

“Right, so my paper work isn’t always… perfectly up to date. But I file the important stuff. I do things by the book,” she grimaces as she fishes a banana skin - or what used to be a banana skin - out of the back of one of the drawers, “most of the time.”

“I’m impressed… I didn’t even know you ate fruit.”

She rolls her eyes, but she can’t stop the corner of her mouth twitching into the tiniest of smiles as she spreads out more papers.

They work methodically through the stacks of paper, filtering out important paperwork (though there’s barely anything she would count as important that hasn’t already been filed away), throwing out anything over a year old, and coming across more old food wrappers (and empty bottles) than she’d care to admit.

“Jessica…”

She’s pouring over old tax documents when Malcolm hesitantly calls her, and she knows from the sound of his voice what it’s going to be before she even raises her eyes. He holds a thick manilla folder that she’d jammed down the bottom, her own sloppy handwriting across the front.

“Do you think we should toss this, or…?” he asks, holding it out to her.

She tries not to snatch as she takes it from him. The folder is marked Kilgrave. She doesn’t need to open it to know its contents, the pages in the back of her mind like a photographic memory. Jessica slips the cover open, and a photograph of Hope Shlottman floats out onto the floor. Wincing, Jessica runs her fingers over the outline of her face. She still can’t rest without thinking of the face of the innocent girl who Kilgrave took, purely because of her. She still sees her dead body writhing on the ground after she took her own life.

“No, we should keep this,” she says, swallowing hard, pressing the photograph back inside the folder and putting it decisively in the ‘keep’ pile.

*

“I need your help,”

“Jess, it’s late… or early… whichever… what’s wrong? Are you okay? Is—”

“There’s something wrong with Hellcat.”

Trish audibly groans, and Jessica can see her burying her head under an expensive silk pillow, even through the phone.

“Hey, you told me to call if I needed anything—“

“That was before you… Jessica, I know nothing about pets. I don’t know what to tell you. Take her to a vet?”

“I think Malcolm’s been over-feeding her, maybe giving her scraps. She’s got like super fat lately, and now she’s spent the whole night… I don’t know, puking or something. She puked on my good jeans.”

“You say that like you own more than one pair.”

“What if she’s dying?” Jessica hisses, idly petting the cat with the hand her phone isn’t in.

Trish groans, “okay, alright, fine. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. God.”

When Trish arrives, she doesn’t know what she expects, but it isn’t Jessica sitting sprawled out on the sofa with two tiny black balls of fluff squirming about on her stomach, Hellcat curled up around them.

“Hey,” Jessica says, and the look on her face is so priceless, Trish wishes she had her camera to hand.

*

Jessica, with her apartment full of the sound of mewling kittens, and her two best friends sitting cross legged fussing over them, doesn’t recognise herself as the same person she was last year. She looks at her now neatly organised desk, the framed photograph of her and Trish on top of a box of filed away papers; at the scratching post Malcolm bought from gumtree for Hellcat and her offspring; at the pristine, polished glass of her front door, still reading Alias Investigations in proud, gold lettering, and she wonders how she could possibly be the same person.

“You cannot name him Blackie… first of all that’s racist as hell, and secondly… that’s like, the most stereotypical name in the book. No. He’s more of a… Stanley,” Malcolm insists, scratching the smallest kitten under its tiny chin.

Trish rolls her eyes, “Stanley is an old man’s name! Fine, but we’re calling her Smudge. That isn’t negotiable.”

“Both those names are terrible,” Jessica joins in, sliding off the couch to join them, “they’re my cats and I’m naming them.”

“This, coming from the person who thought ‘Hellcat’ was a good name,” Trish says, looking pointedly at Malcolm for back-up.

“It does suit her,” he starts, shrugging his shoulders, “makes her sound pretty kickass, for a cat anyway.”

“Okay, that’s settled. The kittens are Morticia and Gomez, respectfully, and that’s the end of it.”

Trish lifts the small female kitten to her face and kisses her tiny nose, “Morticia… I like it… it’s almost like… Patricia—“

Jessica groans, “absolutely not. We are not calling her Trish for short. It’s Morticia not MorTRISHA.”

“Thank god for that, cos that’s the last thing we need… More-Trish-a.” Malcolm quips, elbowing Trish in the ribs, who rolls her eyes.

I don’t deserve them, Jessica thinks, lifting her glass to her lips, and watching as her friends continue to tease each other, the two tiny kittens padding back and forth between them.

*

She had forgotten about the support group entirely so when Malcolm asks her if she’d like to swing by one night, she doesn’t feel like she can say no. It’s been nine months. Best part of a year. She thinks about it and she doesn’t believe it could have been such little time. That so much could have changed.

They still meet in bars and cafes, mostly after dark, Malcolm says. They talk like old friends, no longer bound to one another by the retelling of old stories. The marks around their throats are gone. Jessica wonders if they still see Hope Shlottman when they close their eyes at night.

Around the table, they talk about their lives, about every day things to be thankful for. She had thought she’d feel bored, that she was just doing this out of a sense of responsibility, but if anything, she’s relieved. She feels like boxing up all of these stories, storing them away for later. It makes her warm inside to hear how these people’s lives have moved on, how her own life has. She doesn’t carry around the burden quite so tightly.

“Thank you,” she says earnestly, as she and Malcolm walk home, “I really needed that.”

“Anytime,” he says, and she wonders when she let him get to know her better than she knows herself.

*  
Morticia - Titch, Trish calls her - lives at Trish’s apartment, has a bed in the living room that probably cost more than all the furniture in Jessica’s apartment combined.

“What’s next - you get your gym turned into a bedroom for her?”

Trish smirks, pouring glasses of wine at her kitchen island. The cat winds around her feet but settles in Jessica’s lap.

“Here’s to one year, Kilgrave free,” Trish says, once Jessica’s got a glass in hand, and she’s sunk onto the couch.

Hearing the words makes Jessica more uneasy than she’s willing to admit, but she toasts because it’s tradition, because this is what they do: one year away from Dorothy, one year clean, one year out of therapy… The list goes on. They clink glasses and Jessica drains her glass in one go. Trish takes a tiny sip, then puts the glass to one side.

It doesn’t feel like a year. She still remembers the way his mouth wrapped around her name, the way he touched Trish, how his neck felt in her hands, the crack when she twisted and let go. She stills sees Reva and Hope and Rueben and all the others. She still has to live with what she did and what she didn’t do and what she was responsible for. What she’s still responsible for now.

“Jess, it’s over,” Trish says, for what feels like the hundredth time, “I know it’s difficult for you to accept, even now, but this time it’s really over. It’s finished.”

It’s been a year, she thinks, again, and she wishes she could just let it go.

“When you said… that night. That was just a ploy to get him wasn’t it?” Trish says after a comfortable silence, her voice small and unsure. It’s rare - since they left her mother, anyway - that she sounds like this. It takes Jessica aback, makes her feel like a kid again.

“No,” she says, gruffly.

“It was nice to hear. I don’t… I mean no one’s ever said it to me before. Well, never said it and meant it.”

Jessica knows she’s thinking of Dorothy, bruising her and forcing her to throw up, and making her prance about in that awful red wig, and insisting it’s because she loves her. It’s never occurred to Jess that Trish might have never felt loved before.

“It’s not like I haven’t meant it before. I’m really bad at… this.”

Trish’s lips tug into a smile, and her hands find their way into Jessica’s lap, fingers curling around hers. Jessica’s always found it so difficult to be physically intimate with anybody in a way that isn’t rough sex, but somehow she feels like she’s getting better at it.

“Kilgrave was right, you know, you are the most important thing to me. I couldn’t risk you. That’s why I spend so much time, I don’t know, pushing you away,” she looks down at their hands, her brow furrowed. She wants a drink. She’s not used to being this honest.

“Promise you won’t do that again?” Trish asks, softly, and she looks like her heart might break if she doesn’t get the right answer.

Jessica’s throat is dry. She nods.

For a moment, Trish looks uncertain. She lets go of Jessica’s hands, and Jessica wonders if she’s blown it, if her emotional detachment has once again ruined everything. But then Trish moves decisively, cupping her face in her hands, and before Jessica knows what’s happening, her lips are pressed softly against Jessica’s. The kiss is short and sweet and unlike anything that has ever happened to Jessica before, and when she pulls away, she instantly misses the contact.

Trish smiles to herself, lifting her fingers to her lips.

“I should give up on you moving back in here, shouldn’t I?”

Jessica looks down at the floor, unable to meet her eyes, “I have an apartment now… an office… a proper, functioning front door…” she glances up at her, smiles, “and besides, where would the cat sleep?”

“Oh, I didn’t say you were getting your old room back,” Trish says, a sparkle in her eye, “I mean, where else am I going to train?”

**Author's Note:**

> We had some debate on tumblr about whether or not Trish drinks, her being a recovering addict... after pawing through so much detail that my eyes started to hurt, I reached the conclusion that she probably doesn't, but she's obviously comfortable enough being in situations that have alcohol in them (the first flashback in episode 5, they're clearly in a bar), so I figured that that end scene was probably OK. Thanks for reading :)


End file.
